Farm Project: Mike Meire

By Sophie Lovell

In German publishing circles, the name Mike Meiré is legend. As designer of the ground breaking business magazine Brand Eins and its predecessor, Econy in the ‘90s, he was instrumental in defining the look of a whole new genre of contemporary German magazines and his influence is still felt; from his art direction of BMW’s Mini magazine to a controversial makeover of the cult Berlin-based 032C (see Wallpaper* 100). Editorial design is just one of the creative fields Meiré ploughs, sows and scatters. As brand director of fifteen years standing for the German sanitary fittings manufacturer Dornbracht, he has given the brand a unique identity and credibility.

‘I am involved in keeping the edges of the brand sharp’ he explains, before listing to a who’s who of late 20th century creatives - from Jürgen Teller via Veronique Branquinho to Marc Quin - he has enlisted to ‘conduct artistic research into the bathroom’. The results of this ‘research’ have been shown at a variety of exhibitions, performances and interventions ranging from the Venice Art Biennale to the Cologne furniture fair; all evidence of the radical approach of Andreas Dornbracht, the company’s forward-thinking CEO. Despite criticism from some quarters, Meiré’s plan to associate a company that basically makes bathroom taps with creative and conceptual daring has come off, making Dornbracht a kind of Prada of plumbing.

Two years ago, Andreas Dornbracht decided to expand the company’s range and asked his brand director to turn his innovative attentions to the kitchen, or rather the idea of the kitchen. Meiré’s response was to take the pristine industrial/laboratory model, dominant at the luxury end of the kitchen market, and really mess it up.

‘I felt that minimalism was a bit finished’, he explains, ‘there are so many strong brands doing perfect kitchens and I felt it had somehow got rather extreme and ridiculous – even a coffee cup looks out of place if you leave it on the counter. I have a wife and three kids, so for us the kitchen has always been a very communicative and energetic place’.

Meiré presented his first kitchen concept, the Dornbracht Edges Farm Project, in Milan last year. A fresh new take on the rural-inspired kitchen comprises a visual riot of fresh and packaged foodstuffs, plastic containers, live domestic animals, found objects and improvised furniture. Nothing is hidden away in Meiré’s kitchen, everything – from Asian food store products to tableaux inspired by 18th century Dutch still-lives full of dead animals – is on display in a what he calls ‘orchestrated chaos’, contained within an archetypal barn-like building.

The kitchen furnishings are a hotchpotch of ceramics and furniture that Meiré and his wife collected from flea markets: worthless, even ugly, things in conventional design terms, but remixed, placed in a new context, they become familiar, comfortable, reassuring and even rather refreshing. ‘Sometimes my wife and I laughed [at the objects we included] because they were so tacky’, he says, ‘but somehow in this context they became beautiful again.

With his ‘Farm’ kitchen, Meiré wanted to embrace the richness of life that minimalism had taken away: the sense of ‘home’, of family and centred community is what he wants to bring back into the domestic equation – the kitchen as the engine of the house full of people. But also the animals, cooking, smells, sounds and life – or the ‘stage’ on which the drama of domestic life is played out.

In Milan; earlier this year in the Passagen during the Cologne furniture fair and again this summer at Münster’s massive sculpture festival, the Farm project has proved a serious draw: packed with visitors cooking, talking, eating together whilst their kids charged around stroking the piglets and playing in the rough straw bales scattered outside as seating. The atmosphere was magnetic and certainly seemed to prove the adage that everybody prefers to be in the kitchen at parties – especially when it’s such a charismatic kitchen: ‘I wanted to have a romantic place’ says Meiré, ‘but I also wanted to say: 'hey, this is very sharp, this is very now.' If we ignore these alternative statements in design we are missing out on something.' And he has a point.

But, of course, there is another more sober side to the concept. It can be seen as a survivalist’s bolthole stocked with supplies and essentials, a necessary precaution given inevitable Armageddon, of some nasty stripe or other.

As Meiré was designing the kitchen, the news seemed to be filled with natural catastrophes and there was disaster imagery everywhere: ‘It was terrible’, he says, ‘and I don’t want to sound cynical, but there was an appealing aesthetic to this as well because when everything falls apart, then other things come to the surface.'

Thus his literal translation of the disaster zone temporary shelter in the make-up of the façade: whereas the interior is made of plywood with a quasi homey feeling – especially with the live animals – like a kind of Noah’s ark, the exterior looks like a stylised shack.

True to his unconventional mix and match approach, he also based this exterior on the Eames contract storage shelves from the 1960s: an aluminium frame forms a grid into which a wide variety of sheet building materials has been slotted – from humble plasterboard to expensive sheet copper. The contrasting value of these materials used, he says, represents the contrast between the disparate worlds of prestige premium product design and the improvised livelihood of survivors who don’t give a damn about design and just want to get a roof over their heads.

And of course you can accuse Meiré of coming on all Marie Antoinette. In some ways he has summoned up – shacky and make-shift though it is – a romantic, bourgeois, idealised countryside, espousing the ‘good life’ and lamenting the loss of sensual domestic innocence. Meiré accepts the criticism but insists that a number of ‘aesthetic breaks’ - such as the orange plastic building site netting used for the fencing around the livestock, or the roughly strapped together Muji boxes and mustard-coloured Dornbracht tap as part of a mobile worktop – make this much more than an urbanite’s fantasy of the country kitchen.

‘It was important for me to have these Rem Koolhaas-like architectural statements in acid colours mixed in with the country style in order to create a kind of fusion or crossing-over and make me love this country aesthetic again’ he enthuses. And although one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this whole project is part of a brand image campaign, the Farm Project seems to have ignited an essential and completely contemporary longing: In design terms it has made eloquently, if messily, clear minimalism’s emotional and experiential denial; and as a ‘lifestyle proposition’ it simply reminds us how important good food and good company really are.

9 August 2007 | Design